


Hard Reset

by Kiyaar



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Amnesia, Angst, Avengers Vol. 5 (2013), Hurt No Comfort, Infinity Gems, M/M, Mindwipe, Not A Fix-It, The Illuminati (Marvel)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-14
Updated: 2015-05-14
Packaged: 2018-03-30 13:48:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3939139
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kiyaar/pseuds/Kiyaar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“You used me,” Steve says, like he expected better. </p><p>“What are you going to do about it?” is all Tony ends up saying, pathetic and petulant and tired, though Steve has only ever recognized it as arrogance. </p><p>“Now?” Steve says, as if there will be a later. “Now, I’m going to beat you bloody.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hard Reset

**Author's Note:**

  * For [NohaIjiachi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/NohaIjiachi/gifts).



> Diverges from canon after Avengers #29. Ignore SIM. Ignore the Universe and her dumb intervention when Tony and Steve were about to bury the hatchet. Ignore the Time Gem Time Travel Extravaganza that was never actually explained fully. Ignore.
> 
> Written for the Cap/IM RBB 2014. Based on [noha's ART](https://40.media.tumblr.com/2156af7760a7c883a6903e8644347c49/tumblr_noctwvQcp91qc2gymo1_1280.jpg)!! Go [reblog](http://nohaijiachi.tumblr.com/post/118967922416/and-now-for-another-extremely-late-2014-rbb-this) and tell her how wonderful it is!

I.

 

“You used me,” Steve says, like he expected better.

Everything goes away.

No I didn’t. Yes I did. Please. Remember when I brought you bagels? Remember when you saved me? Remember when you saved me? Remember when you called me Shellhead? Remember when you cancelled on Nick Fury so we could lie in bed together while it rained? Do you remember?

“What are you going to do about it?” is all Tony ends up saying, pathetic and petulant and tired, though Steve has only ever recognized it as arrogance.

“Now?” Steve says, as if there will be a later. “Now, I’m going to beat you bloody.”

It seems Tony is the only liar.

Please, he thinks dimly. Please let me tell you. Please let me beg. Please, do it. End this. A thousand guilty abstracts all tangled into an impossible knot.

Finally, he thinks.

Tony lets himself fall backwards and feels his nose crack. He lets Steve beat him into the ground. He thinks about how it felt to kiss Steve. How it felt to know that Steve might have loved him back.

I’m sorry, he thinks. I’m sorry.

Did you love me, too, he thinks.

He gets his answer when Steve cracks his skull.

 

II.

 

The man wakes to a water-stained ceiling and a dim thump-hiss of an antiquated machine next to him. The air smells stale, antiseptic. Something hisses next to him in the blue-dark.

His breath is dry. His mouth is dry. His throat burns. His body is a desert.

There’s a beeping some part of him recognizes, dimly, as his own heartbeat.

He blinks, and his eyes are crusted over and aching. There’s a set of monitors to his right, an IV line into his arm, some clear drip wired to a stand and an empty chair pushed into the corner. He turns his head, and the muscles in his neck scream at it; this small movement is graceless and labored and hard, but he turns his head, to the window, dark but for the outside light falling into the room and picking up the green tinge of the curtains.

Not a hospital, then.

His face itches. He reaches a hand up to feel his face, and gets coarse hair, a few weeks’ worth, at least, under his palm. He stares at the suspended ceiling, one of the tiles stained and yellowed at the corner, and something fires in his brain, something that sets him spinning, that sends his whole body reeling, something that feels wrong, thinks where and why and how –

He tries to lever himself to sitting, but his wrists shake with it and his body is lead, stiff, his head is so heavy –

He doesn’t want to, but he reaches to feel at his scalp, gingerly, through a mess of hair, presses his fingertips to the shape of his skull, finds something too hard to be bone –

He presses at it, hard and unyielding. He probes with his fingertips, he – knocks on the side of his head.

Metal.

There is a metal plate in his skull under a taut stretch of knobbled scalp.

“Hello?” he tries to say, but it comes out as a hoarse moan, because his mouth is cotton. And then he can’t breathe, and then his chest is tight, and then all there is is a whining mechanical drone and the shapes of the room blurring in his eyes and the only thing he feels is confusion and the blinding sensation of dizziness after nothing for – long.

He instinctively knows that, and not much else.

He tries, this time, and it’s all an enormous, terrifying blank.

“Nurse,” he says, but he forgets the rest of what he’s going to say when a woman bursts into his room in jeans and a T-shirt and a Glock pointed at his face, and then his heart is pounding and the monitor is speeding up and he doesn’t understand.

“Please,” he says, and raises his hands, shaking.

She lowers her gun, swearing, and digs out her cell phone.

 

\- - -

 

It takes her a while. To unhook the monitors, to get the catheter out, for him to be coaxed to sitting, slowly, this time, to get through the battery of tests she gives him, to make sure his spine is still intact, to make sure he doesn’t have speech problems, for her to dig out scans from three years ago and suggest that he go to an actual hospital for new ones.

The Doctor – Linda, she says, like she’s irritated she has to be saying anything at all, talks at him for a while and all he can do is sit on the edge of his bed and flex his fingers, look at his hands, soft and delicate and thin. The tag around his wrist that says John Doe.

“No aphasia,” the doctor decides, and she looks thrilled about it. She clicks her penlight off and snips the tag off of his wrist with a knife she casually pulls from her pocket. “I’d call it a miracle, but I’m told there’s no such thing,” she says absently, rapping her pen on the light board. “There’s a plate in your skull – you were brought in with massive cerebral trauma, they managed to bring the swelling down some on the helica – before he brought you up here, but with the edema, it’s really remarkable.”

Life support for three years. He still hasn’t gotten past that one. It’s something that you hear on Lifetime dramas; man in coma mysteriously wakes up.

He is the man in the coma. There is no one sitting at his bedside.

The man reaches his hand up to feel at the thing right under his scalp, right under his greasy shag of hair.

“Can I just,” he says, standing up, reeling, and his legs feel like putty beneath him. He lurches, and he’s grateful she’s there, dropping her clipboard to hold him around the waist, even as there’s a nurse rushing to his side. “Can I just look in a mirror, I don’t–”

Remember, he thinks, but his mouth is dry and it won’t make the words. He feels like he’s going to throw up and it’s that, more than anything else, that spurs him to his feet, that forces him to stand.

He makes it to the sink, his nurse doting and his cheeks burning in shame the whole time, and when he gets there, he stares, for a long time, at the dark blue eyes staring back at him in a face gone gaunt with sleep, at his thin face and dark scraggly head. His nose looks like it’s been broken a half-dozen times. His hair is uneven and ill groomed on one side of his head, patchy where they must have shaved him to crack his skull and screw in the plate and pull the skin grafts over.

She hovers in the bathroom door for a moment before carefully schooling her face into something that isn’t shocked.

“You don’t remember,” she says tentatively.

“I guess my name is John,” he says, because it’s been eighteen months, and he is no one, and no one –

No one must be looking for him.

“Uh,” she says. “I’m gonna let him handle that one.”

 

III.

 

“Oh,” the man named Reed Richard says.

The man broadcasts his interest level as mediocre at best, like John might as well be a present no one particularly wanted for Christmas for all the reaction he elicits. He looks like he’s fraying – he wears a terrible threadbare canvas jacket that looks like it’s been run over by a four by four, jeans that have faded to a light sky blue, a misshapen black turtleneck. He’s graying, his entire head is shot through with silver, and John secretly thinks his face looks like it’s sagging.

John isn’t sure what to say to his benefactor. He’s fairly certain he’s imposing, somehow. He’s getting the impression he is a burden that no one particularly wants to deal with.

Or wanted.

“Put these on,” Richards says, and thrusts a stack of clothes at him. He digs in his pocket and pulls out a fancy cell phone that illuminates with a glowing StarkTech when he presses the pad of his thumb to it. “Go,” he insists, when John stands there expecting more of an explanation than “oh,” anything, at this point, really. “I’ll settle this.” The man shifts from foot to foot and scratches with gangly fingers at the back of his neck.

Ten minutes later, Reed is ushering him down the steps and across the gravel driveway into the passenger seat of an enormous black vehicle with tinted windows. The doctor is all but shouting into a cell phone, exchanging angry words with someone named Stephen on the cabin’s front porch. She slams the door behind her as she goes back inside and doesn’t wave them off.

“So, uh, I’m not supposed to be in this county – the country, actually, so you’re gonna have to bear with me. I can’t – I’m going to take you to someone that can help, with the memory stuff. Hopefully.”

John thinks he should be pleased to hear this, but he can’t stop looking out the city. They drive by a lot of lakes. The freeway is empty. The sun is just coming up. They cross the Hudson and he can see the city in the distance. New York. He knows that, at least, knows the layer of brown settling over the burgeoning blue chasing the sunrise. Was this his life? Did he live in this city? Did he drive over this bridge every day on his way to work?

“What did I do?” John asks.

Reed’s mouth tightens into a line. “Not here,” he urges. “Just – listen.”

Reed’s mouth starts moving, and by the time it stops Reed has directed him to a bag with several hundred dollars in cash thrown carelessly into the back seat, and glossed right the fuck over every one of John’s questions.

How did my skull get cracked open, why am I alive, what do I owe you for this.

“You shouldn’t be awake,” Reed says, pulling into a miraculously free space in front of a dilapidated building in Queens. Reed fumbles beside his own seat and hands John a very expensive-looking wallet and a pair of ridiculous sunglasses. “You shouldn’t, uh.” He clears his throat.

“Are we friends?” John asks.

Reed looks at his lap and pulls up the parking brake. Sighs.

“We used to be,” he says.

John hears everything else behind that, everything that isn’t going to be said in the space of this vehicle.

“What’s my name,” John says.

Reed sighs and reaches across John’s lap to open his wallet.

“Tony Stark,” he says, and Jo – Tony stares down at his own smirking face from a life he doesn’t remember.

 

IV.

 

“By the Vishanti,” the man in the Dracula cape breathes, like Tony is Jesus fucking Christ or something.

Tony thinks his house is something out of a B-Movie set.

The walls are lined with books, old books, dark and leather-bound. The air is heavy with perfume or incense, spice and wax. Every surface is covered in massive candles that simply burn and drip wax onto the tables, the floor, the surface of the table laid with pieces of parchment with arcane symbols on them.

It’s so dark. It feels like everything should be dusty, ripe with decay, but it’s not. It’s warm. Tony thinks he wouldn’t mind staying here.

This building looked like a condemned tenement from the outside, until Reed pressed his hand to the boarded up door and said something in a language Tony didn’t recognize.

“Uh,” Tony says.

Capeguy pours steaming water into a large mug and offers it to Tony.

“Drink,” he says. His voice is rich and dark. Not unkind. Thoughtful. Weary. He looks at Tony like he can see his soul. There’s grey smeared over his temples. Tony thinks he looks older than he probably is.

Tony wonders how old he is. He could look at his driver’s license. He isn’t sure he wants to know.

“I thought this best,” Reed says. “I didn’t call because I didn’t want to arouse –”

“Of course you did,” Capeguy says bitterly. “Because I always have answers.”

“No,” Reed says irritably. “Because the Sanctorum is warded.”

Capeguy seems far more interested in Tony than he is in Reed. He takes Tony gently by the arm, ushers him into an ancient armchair. Sits in the chair opposite him.

“Do you know who I am?” Capeguy asks.

Tony doesn’t know how to answer that, because he’s too busy looking at Reed.

Reed, who is examining one of the books on the highest bookshelf without the aid of the ladder. Reed, whose body has expanded to twice its normal height.

Tony thinks he might shit himself.

“What the hell,” he croaks.

Capeguy turns around and sighs. “He suffered an accident,” Capeguy says mildly. “His stage name is Mister Fantastic.

“Hysterical,” Richards says, and extends one of his arms to thrice the length it should reasonably be to grab at another dusty tome.

“Do you remember who I am?” Capeguy insists.

“Oh, yeah,” Tony says, “It’s all coming back to me, vampires and – Gumby over there, no, I don’t remember anything–”

“This is very bad,” Capeguy says, and sweeps across the room with his cape billowing behind him to snatch a book off the shelf. “I’m not a vampire,” he says, and he almost looks like he’s laughing.

Tony would really like to know what’s so fucking funny.

“Well, his brain tissue’s healed,” Richards says, and his fucking neck is stretched to roughly the length of a giraffe’s craning to look at another book, “which I find extraordinary; he hasn’t had Extremis since…I can’t remember.”

“Stay still,” Capeguy says. “I want to look at your soul.”

Capeguy holds his hands apart, and then they’re filled with energy, sparking threads of color.

“What the shit,” Tony says, and then there’s something probing him, even though Capeguy’s hands have barely moved, and all he sees is color –

“Bad touch,” Tony snaps, when it’s over, and stands up so quickly he gets violently dizzy and topples his chair. “Who are you people? How the hell do you know all this shit about me, what are you–”

“You never should have done this,” Capeguy says quietly. “And I’m not talking about Linda, Reed–”

“Well, what would you have suggested,” Richards snaps. “It was either this or leave him on the Helicarrier like a vegetable waiting to be plucked by someone, do you know what his brain alone would go for on the black market–”

“You should have let him die,” Capeguy says gravely.

“I am right here,” Tony says.

“Well, I did, in a manner of speaking,” Richards says. “He had zero cerebral activity when I swapped him out for the LMD, no one looks for a dead man–”

“Not dead,” Tony says, “really, seriously not dead, who are you–”

“My name is Stephen Strange,” Capeguy says, “I’m a powerful – you always liked to call me a hack magician,” he says, the corners of his mouth twitching into an almost-smile. “And that is Reed Richards. And you are supposed to be dead.” He sighs. “But you aren’t. Thank my colleague.” His lips curl on the last word, but it’s exhausted.

“Can you do something?” Richards asks, like he has somewhere better to be.

“Can I? Yes,” Strange says. “Should I? His memories don’t just stay there, he had serious brain trauma, Reed.” Quieter, he says, “We should be asking Thor, really.”

“Thor won’t help,” Richards says, and it’s barely a whisper.

“I would have to visit Clea, then,” Strange says. “This is not a simple thing, Reed.”

Richards un-stretches himself long enough to sit in one of the chairs like a goddamned person and tap away at a keyboard. “Well, he can’t go walking around like this,” Richards says. “People are going to ask questions–”

“Hey!” Tony tries, and they’re completely ignoring him -

“I can’t snap my fingers,” Strange says irritably, “my power doesn’t work like that anymore, it would be invasive, I would have to rebuild his memories by hand, do you understand,” he finishes pointedly.

Reed is silent for a minute. “How invasive,” he says thoughtfully.

“The metaphysical equivalent of an icepick lobotomy.” He adds, quietly, “And we both know I’m not the person to do it.”

Tony hears himself hyperventilating before he realizes what’s happening, and his knees are falling out from under him and Strange is catching him and he feels silk against his cheek before someone says “oh hell,” and his chest feels tight, tight, tight –

 

\- - -

 

Tony wakes up on some chaise lounge decorated in rich rugs and more candles.

His hands fly to his head, but his forehead feels smooth, no stitches, all his shaggy hair, no track marks behind his ears, no blood trickling out of his eyes. No lobotomy.

Small favors.

There’s a table, across from the piece he’s lying on, and Cape-Strange, sitting in a folding chair next to it, dressed in normal clothes. Jeans. A black turtleneck, although Tony is fairly certain those went out of style in the 90’s. A leather jacket that makes him look like a mustachioed porn star, if it weren’t for the smears of grey at his temples.

“How are you feeling,” Strange asks, like he couldn’t care less.

“Shitty,” Tony says. “What happened?” He doesn’t really want to know.

“You passed out,” Strange says. “You hyperventilated.”

“Oh,” Tony says, and Strange throws a bottle of water at him. It’s all surreally bizarre, considering this man is a witch. Warlock? Magician, Tony decides. It’s deeply unsettling to see him in a turtleneck and Tony has no idea why. It should make him normal.

“You have PTSD,” Strange says, like he knows everything about Tony.

“From what,” Tony says. He drinks it. If they were going to drug him and sell his brain on the black market, they could have done it already.

A sad smile comes over Strange’s face. “The world hasn’t been kind to you.”

“Do you know me?” Tony feels like he aches all over, and feels at his neck for his pulse. “I mean, did we – do we know each other somehow? All of us? Stretchy guy included?”

Strange’s face brightens, marginally. Tony gets the impression – based on absolutely nothing but a gut feeling he cannot in any conceivable way rely on – that austerity is his default. “Do you remember?”

“No,” Tony says, “Will you please stop answering my fucking questions with more questions?”

Strange steps up, straightens his jacket, throws a pack of cookies at Tony. “Your blood sugar is low. Eat something. Take deep breaths. Don’t panic.”

Tony tears into the packet of cookies because he’s starving. “Oh, don’t panic. Don’t worry about the super-powered freaks and the fact that everyone knows who you are but you.”

Stephen looks a bit cowed, and Tony doesn’t even feel bad for feeling vindicated about it.

“Your name is Tony Stark. You were a very powerful man. You–” Strange rubs at his eyes with the heels of his hands. “This was not supposed to happen,” he says again.

“Uh huh,” Tony says through a mouthful of cookie, because he’s wearing someone else’s underwear and a shirt two sizes too big on him. He looks like a refugee. “Just – out with the fucking sob story.”

Strange’s eyes harden.

“There are people in this world, people like me, people like Richards, with special powers. Some of them are heroes. You used to be on a team of them. They were called the Avengers.”

“What’s my power,” Tony says. He looks at his hands.

Strange’s mouth quirks up like he’s almost amused.

“Nothing,” he says. “Just your exceptional intellect. You built extraordinary machines.”

Black market, Tony thinks. “And that’s why – you put me in that house instead of a hospital? Witness protection in case I woke up?”

“No,” Strange says sharply. “You weren’t supp– You had an accident,” his voice gone tight and sharp, “I believed you to be dead until an hour ago. Richards made a decision he had no right to make, and he removed you from – he left you with Linda. And paid her handsomely, I might add,” Strange says bitterly.

“What kind of accident?” Tony demands. “What kind of accident puts a hole in your skull?”

Strange stares at him for a long time.

“It doesn’t matter. You – you had a public funeral. You are, legally, dead.”

“You said I was on a team,” Tony says slowly. “So where are they, if there’s this team of – superheroes, or whatever, where the hell were they?”

He doesn’t realize it’s bitter until it’s out of his mouth.

“They think you’re dead, too,” Strange says. “Richards – he didn’t lie, you were brain dead, and I have no good explanation for why you aren’t, by rights you should never have woken up.”

“Well, I did,” Tony snarls. “I got better.”

“Yes,” Strange says sadly. “That’s just the problem.”

 

V.

 

Tony walks through the ruins of a sprawling, crumbling, majestic estate.

890 Fifth Avenue, he’d told the driver. Oh, Avengers Mansion. You a tourist, man? There’s this big statue in the back, in the gardens from like the 90’s, before they disbanded. You can’t go in, though, man, it’s condemned.

It’s ok, he’d lied, and it had slipped off his tongue like lying was his profession. I just want to take some pictures.

Something twists in Tony’s stomach and he closes his fist around the key Stephen Strange had pressed into his hand.

“It was your home before it was anyone else’s,” he’d said simply, and thrown a bag at him, a bag with more clothes, more cash, and a bundle of forged documents and credit cards before ushering him out the door, and then there he’d been, discarded again.

It’s like a bomb went off, inside. The place hasn’t been looted, just preserved, and he can’t decide what’s eerier, this, or if it had been gutted: a massive dining room set with cabinets and cabinets of china, one perfectly untouched chair at the head of the table; a foyer with a glass chandelier tipping precariously, its crystal threads bowing to touch the floor; scorched books falling out into a pile where the bookcase has collapsed.

The floor, with an enormous fancy A monogram laid into it in black marble, covered in detritus.

It’s a public place now. You’ll be fine. You don’t look like you, no one will notice.

He wanders. His mind runs around and around the nothing that presses against his chest.

You used to be on a team of them. So there must be evidence. There will be something. That’s always how it goes, isn’t it? A trigger. Something will grab him and something will bowl him over right here and his memories will come flooding back.

He doesn’t realize how much he wants them until he realizes that he’s digging his nails into his palm.

He wanders through what he imagines were common areas: a room with a pool table, a room with a giant flat screen that’s been shattered to hell, a sprawling, once-opulent living room. A massive painting of Captain America hangs above the mantelpiece, and Tony suppresses a snort. He’s not a bad choice, as mascots go; he supposes every organization needs to remember their history, their roots, why they do what they do. It’s why they hang portraits of the Presidents in the White House.

He stops. Has he been to the White House?

He almost walks right past the other pictures.

A man in a ridiculous purple mask and a – bow? – stuffing an entire hot dog into his mouth. A runner-type guy in a blue and red spandex suit hanging upside-down from the ceiling like a bat. A bodybuilder type in a tight gold shirt arguing with some asshole in a flamboyant green and yellow number with a tattoo on his exposed chest wearing a mask. The woman beside them on the couch is doubled over laughing.

They’re all candid. An entire fucking wall of them.

He looks at the pictures, watches a beautiful woman with piles of curly brown hair fall over the lap of a robot wearing a green cape. All these lives, all these moments. They were more than a team. He recognizes Strange in one of them, his arm slung across the shoulders of a woman in a red mask with huge white eyes painted on. She’s in another picture, without the mask, rolling her eyes as another woman with long blond hair and a mask and a lightning bolt across her chest presses a kiss to her cheek.

It feels like family.

Strange knew that. Strange didn’t disclose that.

Jealously claws its way up, supersedes the ghost of nostalgia and balls his hands into fists.

He loses time. He looks at all of them, knows, logically, rationally, he must have known all of them. Rationally there must be something here to flick the switch, to get it back.

Which one is he? He searches, and he knows he’s been looking at this wall for an hour now, but he doesn’t see the man on his driver’s license, doesn’t see what he saw in the mirror, his gaunt face with a broken nose.

Where are they, what happened.

Something quiet and still and buried in him thinks that maybe a lot of them are dead.

There’s a woman with a pixie cut in a long gold and black ball gown, beaming. There are two robots, side-by-side, one red and gold, one silvery-grey with a missile launcher mounted on its back. There’s a man in a filthy white t-shirt arm-wrestling the body–builder guy in yellow while money passes hands between lighting bolt blonde and bow guy. There’s a guy with a ridiculous 70’s pornstache in an expensive suit with thick dark hair signing a check as he sits behind a mahogany desk. There’s a guy in a pretty good replica of a Captain America costume, smiling as he hoists lightning bolt blonde in a bridal carry.

Tony is nowhere, and it feels like drowning.

He’s not in the picture with a tiger-striped woman grinning like she’s just won the lottery. He’s not in the picture of some guy with a metal arm smiling and knocking beers with redhead in a black catsuit. He’s not in the picture with the giant blue cat wrestling some hairy short guy in yellow into a headlock. There is a giant green man, a woman in a yellow suit with a smile like sunshine, a green-skinned woman with dark green hair in a French twist smirking in a business suit. There is a man with a bird perched on his shoulders with his arm around a massive blond guy with blue eyes and the biceps of a marine.

There’s the red and gold robot flat on his back on a gym mat, that same blond guy standing over him and laughing even as he extends a hand.

Tony throws his bag down, pulls out his wallet, and sits on the couch that looks the cleanest. He empties it onto the table:

A black credit card with his name on it.

243 dollars in cash, independent of what Richards and Strange gave him.

An old medical alert card that expired in 2005, thirteen years ago. Supra-ventricular tachycardia, it says.

His driver’s license for the State of New York.

It hasn’t actually hasn’t expired. The man pictured has blue eyes and brown hair, but it’s a stranger. This man is tan, heavier. Stronger. This man grins at the camera and smirks. This man is wearing a dark grey suit. This man has carefully styled his hair so just one piece falls over his temple.

You were a very powerful man, Stephen Strange says.

He stands in front of the wall and looks at the pictures again. He looks through all of them, looks and looks until they don’t make any sense, until the smiles warp and the colors blur and his eyes water.

He is a very powerful man. He shakes his wallet. An insurance card falls out, stuck in the billfold. Tony Stark / Iron Man, Avengers Buy-up plan, it says. He was on a team. He scrapes his fingers into every card slot, every crevice. He is supposed to be dead. Armani, the stamp on the leather says. Exceptional intellect. His credit card has been issued by Stark Industries.

Everything about it screams Empire, but there must have been a person under the glamor of it all.

(Please let him have been a person under it all.)

He pulls out a picture, wedged deep, deep under the slot where his driver’s license would go.

Tony is in this picture. His eyes are closed. He’s sunburnt. Someone has smeared a glob of white shit on his nose. His hair is thick and dark and he’s smiling, just a little.

The blond man from the picture with the robot is kissing the corner of his mouth.

The man from the picture, etched into a thousand absent memories and a thousand vintage posters, a thousand documentaries Tony knows he has watched: throwing a shield, shooting an M-I Garand in old newsreels, the memories spooling up from nowhere, coming from nowhere, but he knows.

The blond man with the blue eyes kissing Tony’s mouth, Captain America.

Tony sits there with the wall of everyone he’s ever known, everyone he’s ever forgotten behind him, his pocketful of trinkets on the table in front of him. He blinks and blinks and remembers nothing. There is a swirling void in him. He had everything. He holds the picture and doesn’t remember, he holds the picture and tries, wants this, he wants this and Captain America was not at his bedside and Captain America died in World War II and Tony Stark was a very powerful man and he looks at the picture and he looks so happy –

“Tony?”

Tony looks up. There is a blond woman standing in the doorway.

“Do you know me?” Tony says in a voice that feels like gravel. His cheeks are wet.

He presses the picture into his palm.

The woman is another one, a different one he doesn’t recognize her from the pictures. She’s tall; her suit is all primary colors, blond hair falling in piles around her shoulders. She doesn’t have a mask.

She presses a hand to her mouth and starts to cry.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, I know you.”

 

VI.

 

Carol Danvers flies. That’s her superpower.

She tells him to put his arms around her neck and wraps one arm around his waist and flies them to the top of the Statue of Liberty like this is every other Tuesday for her.

“You live here,” Tony says, when she sets them down in the crown. “You live here?” Tony pulls back the curtain on the window nearest him and tries to stop himself from audibly gasping. It is spectacular – millions of pinpricks of light floating just beyond the channel of black water.

Carol blinks for a minute. “Yeah,” she says. “New York – yeah, I live here. It’s totally legal. Who knew?”

Tony stares as her costume simply washes away and she’s in jeans and a t-shirt.

“That’s really unsettling,” he says.

“What,” she says, looking around. “Oh. It’s – I had an accident. An alien gave me powers. I can manipulate energy, kinda. And I can fly. And I can actually fly, I’m a – Colonel. U.S. Air Force.”

Tony sits at her kitchen table because he doesn’t know what to say and an enormous ginger cat jumps into his lap. He sneezes.

“Chewie, c’mon,” she says, and pulls the thing out of his lap. “Sorry, I know you’re allergic.”

“How do you know that,” Tony says. “I don’t know that.”

He means it to be funny, but she gives him this look like it’s unbearable to hear. Her gaze lingers on the side of his head. He knows that there are patches of hair missing. It’s scar tissue. It won’t grow back.

He is acutely aware of how uncomfortable he makes everyone.

Tony changes the subject, because there is nothing of him to talk about. “I wish I could fly.”

Carol stops, freezes with her back to him, one hand on the cabinet, one wrapped around a Star Trek mug that’s so faded it’s almost white.

“You don’t remember anything, do you,” she says, doesn’t look at him. “You don’t remember me. You aren’t faking it.”

Tony shakes his head. “Why would I fake it?” he asks, his stomach sinking.

What has he done to earn this, all the lying, all the mistrust? Why is he not in any of the photos?

You were in an accident.

“Why wasn’t I in the photos,” he blurts out. “Why, Strange said I was on the Avengers team and I looked at all of them,” he says, the words spilling out of his mouth. “I wasn’t in any of them, I was just – I was in this – with this doctor, in upstate New York and no one knew except Reed Richards, why did that happen?”

Carol looks like she’s either about to cry, or yell.

“Look, just,” Tony says, “Just tell me and I’ll leave, you’ll never see me again, no one will tell me what the fuck happened. I have no idea who I am.”

Carol very carefully sits across from him, puts a mug of coffee in front of him.

“You were in the photos,” she says. “And they used to call you Iron Man.”

Tony shakes his head and shrugs, “Iron man, what is iron ma–”

“You fucked up,” she says, and she says it to the table. “You fucked big-time up and then your best friend beat you to death.”

 

\- - -

 

Once upon a time, Carol says, you built things.

You were a prisoner of war. You almost died. But you didn’t. You got out. You made a shining suit, you hid your face and smiled your smile and for a while, that was enough. It was enough until you let people in and they almost destroyed you, almost stole who you were. It was enough until you were an inch away from drinking yourself to death. It was enough until the people near you started dying.

It was enough until you put something foreign in your body and still, no one has an explanation for why you couldn’t just ask for help. It was enough until you walked to one side of the room and Cap – because Tony doesn’t know how to think of him as Steve – walked to the other. It was enough until you ended up on a throne and he ended up shot in a cage because of you.

You did that, she says, and he thinks that’s it, that’s the worst, anyone would turn on him for that, but there’s always more.

The lies run deeper. Still waters, Tony thinks, and asks for a drink. Carol tells him she doesn’t keep alcohol in the house and he can’t tell if she’s lying or not.

You lied to all of them, she says, even after you got it all back, even after Steve came back from the dead and decided that you should be allowed to live instead of executed for what you’d done. You lied to all of them and met in dark rooms with men like Reed Richards and Stephen Strange and decided that you were better than everyone else.

There is a picture in Tony’s pocket.

There was cosmic shit going on, she says. End of the world shit, she says. You lied about it. You lied to me. You lied to all of us. You lied to Steve.

He found out, she says.

 

\- - -

 

Tony sits, and sits, and sits with the monster he is.

He is swaddled on Carol’s couch. He thinks he might throw up. He thinks he might throw himself out of Carol’s window.

He doesn’t understand.

There’s a picture in his pocket.

“Carol,” he says, and his voice is so unsteady he feels as though his entire soul might snap if he doesn’t get it under control.

He pulls his hands apart. Peels the picture out of his jeans pocket, damp with sweat. Gives it to her.

“Is this me,” he says, and his voice collapses on the end of it.

His whole body is shaking.

He doesn’t look at Carol’s face, but he can hear her breathing stop next to him.

“Oh, Tony,” she breathes.

No, he thinks, but his brain is shutting down. No, he thinks, but it’s too late, three years too late, probably more if Carol’s account is to be believed, no, he thinks, but he’s already a monster, he wasn’t in the pictures and there won’t be any more pictures. No, and there’s a horrible keening he realizes is coming from his mouth, it’s not fair, it’s not fair, it’s not fair.

“I don’t want to be that,” he wails, and it sounds so weak, it sounds so pitiable. “I don’t want that to be me. That can’t be me.”

You never should have woken up.

 

\- - -

 

The morning is miserable. Carol makes him wear a pair of aviators she has lying around and drives them to JFK. She presses a plastic card into his hand that has his name and a picture of the man he used to be on it.

“You need me,” she says, “you press this.”

“Won’t this,” he starts, and fails, because he feels it creeping up his throat. “The others all hate me, right?” He smiles and feels his eyes welling up. He’s grateful for the glasses.

“There aren’t any others left,” she says, like there’s no saga behind that, like there were no tears, as if everything there was just ceased to be.

Like it may as well have never happened.

She gives him an address, scribbled on a piece of paper. Clutches him like she might never see him again. Snots on his shoulder a little.

“I don’t like this,” she says fiercely in his ear. “Be safe.”

She’s gone, then, like she was never there.

 

VII.

 

Tony Stark steps off a plane in Charlottetown, Canada, gets his fake passport stamped and strolls through customs with his duffel bag and his giant sunglasses. The day is bright and just warm enough to feel like spring after a long winter. He hadn’t thought to ask what season it was, just got April from his boarding pass.

He had four hours, four hours on that flight to open the file Carol gave him, the one about Rogers, Steve, the one that’s too thick and stamped with too many stamps and confidential.

He throws it in the trash as the doors hiss open for him.

 

\- - -

 

He lies and acts and forges his way through the car rental. His erstwhile friends have deep pockets. The money he puts down is enough to buy the Mustang they pull around for him. He knows how he looks, in his borrowed clothes and his less-than designer jacket. He does not look the part for renting a car from this agency. He thinks he must have known how to grease people with money, once.

Somehow, he knows just how it handles, just how it banks and slows.

He drives north, across verdant fields of rippling grass and the sky wide and blue above him.

It feels like the closest he’ll ever get to flying.

 

\- - -

 

There’s an old car parked next to the farmhouse. He has no way of knowing if it belongs to Steve Rogers; the house is sprawling with a wraparound porch and a ridiculously green lawn and four little mailboxes next to the door.

That’s good. He’s less likely to inspire a fight with civilians in close proximity, if Steve Rogers is still anything like the man Carol told him about.

Tony parks his Mustang and rings the bell marked S. Rogers.

He waits, rings again. Again.

The air is blowing in. He can smell the salt of the sea, even though it’s cold, even though it’s arctic air, really. He’ll take a walk.

He pulls out the picture.

 

\- - -

 

His walk brings him to the farmer’s market, because it’s a one-horse town and Tony thinks three years in a bed is enough. He has to lean on the stands sometimes. He’s winded by the time he makes it there, but.

He is alive.

He doesn’t really need anything. He buys an apple, and he’s biting into it when he sees him.

He’s not sure it’s really actually him, but when he gets a glimpse of his eyes –

He touches his cheek and maneuvers himself into the next aisle, something constricting in his chest.

It’s slightly too cold for outdoor grocery shopping, but this guy moves like he doesn’t even feel it. Tony watches this blond man – Steve, he makes himself say again, because repetition has to be worth something - move up and down the rows, watches him hand over blue dollars for apples, for a bunch of something green and leafy, for brown eggs he has to wait for while the woman puts them into a carton. Tony can't hear anything he says, his voice must be low - or maybe he doesn't say anything and it's all just nods and smiles at the vendors. Tony isn’t close enough, maybe.

(Is it a growl? Is it a deep baritone? Is it aching or sharp or –)

Tony pulls the photo out again, and at this point it's really becoming a compulsion, clutches it in very cold fingers. The photo, of the smiling person named Captain America with blue eyes, his arm resting on Tony's - Iron Man's - shoulders, his mouth pressed to Tony’s skin like he’s precious.

Tony is so wrapped up in not feeling anything at all that he almost misses the blond man shuffling the stuff in his brown paper bag and hunching his way back to the street, his coat zipped up to his chin, his portfolio case slung over his shoulder.

He doesn't look like a killer, Tony thinks. He can't see it.

Tony sticks his hands deep in his pockets and shivers in the cold and follows him back up the hill, walks on the opposite side of the road back to the farmhouse.

Caution, he tells himself.

But that’s not it, because something else, something erased and buried and erased again inside him screams punishment.

 

\- - -

 

Tony slips in the door behind him, catches the screen just before it catches and clatters. Tries to keep himself running, takes the stairs two at a time, his hand on the splintering banister.

And then he’s just there, fumbling with his keys with a brown bag of groceries clamped under his elbow while Tony reaches the landing.

Captain America. Steve.

Tony’s, once, maybe.

“Hey, Cap,” Tony says, and the blond man freezes where he stands.

Tony is convinced he’s gotten it wrong, and he stands there and swears he can feel time fracturing until Steve turns around.

The bag of groceries falls to the floor, and Steve Rogers stares through him.

Tony bites his lip. “Uh.”

It’s not even disbelief on his face, it’s – misery. It’s the look someone gets when everything falls apart and there’s nothing to fix it with. Steve’s eyes are bright and welling and Tony feels something aching in his chest when he looks at them.

Tony –

Tony thinks Captain America is going to start crying in front of him if he doesn’t say something, and Tony thinks it’s absurd that he even has the capacity to care about this stranger.

This stranger, who beat him to death.

Say something, but Tony’s mouth is dry and his heart is pounding and there is a hole where there should be anger and fear and hatred. Who are you, who were we, he wants to ask. How badly did I have to hurt you? Did I earn this?

Did you do it because you loved me, or because you didn’t anymore?

“Can we go for a walk,” is what Tony asks, in the end.

 

 

\- - -

 

They walk all the way to the beach, to the dunes, to the clay cliffs, and Steve doesn’t say a fucking word.

Steve Rogers walks beside him. Steve Rogers does not carry the thing Tony knows he had in that portfolio case he left just inside the door. Even still, his footprints in the red clay of the dunes are even, heavy. Plodding. He’s enormous, he’s bigger than Tony ever really imagined he would be, even from the propaganda posters and the old movies, but he just walks, hunched, slumping, like it’s too much, like everything is too much and he’s weary down to his soul.

“It’s beautiful here,” Tony tries, because it is, because this meandering stretch of sand and grass and salt air blowing back over the bay is more than he’d ever imagined. Steve Rogers is from the city, Tony remembers. Steve Rogers has been knee deep in bodies and blood and war. He’s probably never gotten the chance to sit on a beach in his life.

Steve Rogers reaches into his jacket with shaking hands and pulls out a pack of cigarettes.

“Isn’t that illegal in Canada,” Tony says, and Steve sits on the edge of an orange clay rock face and lights up a cigarette.

Tony privately thinks his silence is infuriating. Something in him is wired for this to gall him and he’s beginning to think he will never remember who or what or why.

Steve is running a hand through his hair and holding his cigarette with three fingers.

“I’m surprised you left the States,” Tony says, like he has any idea how to make small talk out of this. He fingers the phone in his pocket, four numbers programmed into it: Reed Richards, Stephen Strange, Carol Danvers, someone named James Rhodes, whom Carol had promised would find him if need be. Four allies in all the world.

The smoke just leaks out of Steve’s mouth before he recovers and takes a shuddering drag.

“They stripped me of citizenship,” he says.

Tony is an idiot. He threw the file away. He threw his single best source away because he was a coward.

Steve starts to talk, and then it gets worse, hearing his voice. The flatness of it. Nothing like the movies. Nothing like he would imagine from that smiling man in the pictures.

Tony suspects he did that.

He finds it difficult to listen to what Steve is actually saying, because his voice is deep and soft and you would never know he was a chain-smoker. Tony wonders if that’s the serum. He wonders if Steve had scars after that fight.

He wonders if it was really a fight.

Tony works that one out for a minute and feels bizarrely sorry for this man who beat his head until he was bleeding out into his brain.

“Are you an LMD,” Steve is asking him.

“What’s an LMD,” Tony says.

Steve stares at him. “That’s not funny,” he says. “Can we just – cut the bullshit. One time,” he says.

Tony turns, faces, touches Steve on the shoulder. “Steve, I’m no–”

Steve slaps his hand away, and immediately looks horrified to have done so.

“Ow,” Tony says. “What the fu–”

“Don’t,” Steve says, and shrugs away from him. “I’m – don’t.”

Tony is still for a minute.

“I don’t know why I thought you’d be honest with me,” he says, mostly to himself. “I.” He eyes the pack of cigarettes in Steve’s lap. “Carol told me you wouldn’t want to see me.”

Steve’s head snaps around.

“What?” he says, like he honestly doesn’t know what the fuck Tony is talking about.

“Carol?” Tony tries. “Carol Danvers?”

“I know who Carol is, why–”

Watching Steve’s face fall is like watching the universe collapse.

“You don’t,” Steve starts, clears his throat, takes a deep drag on his cigarette. “You don’t remember who I am. Didn’t they–”

When Tony looks, he’s shaking so violently Tony can see his hands trembling.

“You always had back-up plans,” Steve says, and it sounds like he’s choking on it. “You always had some fucking plan up your sleeve. Damn it, Tony.”

He pulls his hand away from his face and his cheeks are wet.

“If it makes you feel better, I didn’t plan this,” Tony says. “I wasn’t supposed to be alive, apparently.  
I don’t know who I am. I don’t know who I was.” He sighs. “I mean, I know, I don’t remember. I thought–”

“You were an asshole,” Steve says, somewhere between laughter and sobbing.

He draws another cigarette from his pack and puts the stub of his last one out on the back of his own wrist.

“Yeah?” Tony asks.

“Yeah,” Steve nods. “Jesus.”

Then Captain America crying in front of him becomes less theoretical and more Tony watching tears streak and splotch his face while Steve tries to pretend it isn’t happening.

“I just wanted to know what happened,” Tony tries, after an excruciating minute of Steve Rogers losing his shit.

Tony reminds himself: you cannot feel nostalgia for someone you’ve never met before.

Except this clearly isn’t that. This clearly isn’t acquaintances, or even colleagues, or brothers.  
“I’m sorry,” Tony says, and means it, and Steve looks at him, red-eyed and snot-faced and laughs.

“You would be,” he says, utterly lacking conviction, and Tony marvels that that can even hurt, because they’re both talking about people they used to be, and Tony is all but acting. “You would say that.”

“I don’t–”

“The thing I think,” Steve says, “The thing I think, over and over, is that…”

“Steve, I didn’t–”

“Well, you did, and you’re here, so listen, for once in your fucking life.” Steve snaps. “Shut up and listen. You said something. We were – we were on a mission,” Steve nods to himself. “And I asked you – you, Tony, I asked you who should be the one to – to do it.”

Steve’s eyes are cloudy with something. Betrayal? Hatred? Tony hasn’t spent enough time with him to tell. Tony doesn’t remember this, either.

“And I listened to you,” Steve whispers. “Because I’d spent so long not listening to you. Not trusting you. And you told me – ‘it has to be you, Steve.’”

Steve turns his face up and his cheeks are wet.

“You said it was an extension of my will. That it was my idea and it wouldn’t work unless I believed in it.”

“I don’t remember any of this.” Tony shrugs.

Whatever brightness was in Steve’s face stutters and dies.

“Well, the point is, It didn’t work,” Steve says, voice tight. “It – it worked, but I broke the only tool we had to fight the thing we were fighting. So tell me. Is that coincidence?”

“Is what coincidence,” Tony sighs, because he’s not following.

Steve looks like he would like to strangle Tony but can’t quite muster up the energy.

“You still don’t fucking get it,” Steve says. “Your favorite thing to say. I’m a futurist, Steve,” he all but spits, “You think things into being. You predict the future. You manipulate people. It was all you and I was so wrapped up in hating you I didn’t want to look any further than that.”

Tony doesn’t have anything for that.

“Did you love me before you hated me?” he finally asks.

Steve looks at him for a long time. “Did you come here to ask me that?”

Tony picks his head up and stares back. “I came here because of this,” he says.

Tony pulls out the picture, and the hand he holds out to Steve is shaking, too.

Steve sits there, his eyes glued to the fucking photo, the cigarette burning in his hand.

“This is what happened,” Steve says after a long while. “I trusted you, and you didn’t ever trust me back.”

Steve looks him in the eye. “I don’t regret it.”

Tony wants to ask which part he means, the loving or the hating or the beating to death, but he doesn’t deserve it, knows Steve feels the same, whoever he is, whoever they were, whoever he was.

He wants this to mean more than it does.

He is ready to ask for all of this, and then Steve is pressing his cigarette down onto the photo, burning his own face away, and Tony can smell the celluloid melting.

“No, St–,” Tony says, bitten-off, choked down, but it’s already done.

“Here,” Steve says, mirthless, and passes it back. “I fixed it for you.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm kiyaar.tumblr.com.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Breaking Point (The Abort, Retry, Fail Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5980720) by [Sineala](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sineala/pseuds/Sineala)




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